Drew expresses like a grown up what I have been whining about lately (or did I manage not to publish those posts?). I guess it's that fatherhood thing that gives him such an adult outlook!

oh give me a break!

Brian Dear takes a look at what's happened to some of the gazillions of ____ for Dean websites.

Christian Crumlish sent an email out to his entire network (if mine's 30,000+, I'm sure his is at least that)

subject: is orkut over?

text: looks like everybody got bored. does anyone have tetris?

heh heh...

Damn! This is the next in a line of cool stuff Ryan is doing with Longhorn. Very impressive. Trying to remember what I did with all of the free time on my hands when I was 20 (ish)...

Business People Liken Stress of Travel to Trip to Dentist, According to New Survey Released by Microsoft

Company Is Introducing New Microsoft Office Live Meeting Service In Series of Events to Dramatize Unnecessary Hardships of Business Travel

(http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/sep03/09-15BizTravelPR.asp)

This caught my eye because I am in the throes of trying to decide whether or not to accept an unsolicited invitation (request really) to speak at the Mobile Devcon. It would mean 3 trips to the west coast in the course of two months (MVP Summit in April and TechEd in May). I live in Vermont. I am stressed out just contemplating this and I really owe them an answer.

"Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman," Bush said in a statement. "If activist judges insist on re-defining marriage by court order, the only alternative will be the constitutional process. We must do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage."

Have you seen these funny commercials for people with [I assume] mild incontinence? The lady in the jury box in the middle of a trial, the lady stuck in her car with the grandkids at a drive through safari?

It makes my husband laugh and tease me. Why? Why am I even writing about this? No,  I don't have that particular problem. However, I do seem to sit in front of the computer, knowing I gotta go, but... just gotta finish this last thought in my blog or... try this last line of code to see if it does the trick etc. Hours can go by. God forbid I have to sneeze! (hee hee) Rich is always amazed. He think Microsoft should stop sending me t-shirts and mugs and maybe send me Depends instead.

I have a sneaking suspicion that there are probably a lot of geeks who do this, too.

Oh well, gotta go...

There is a barely documented problem with Crystal Reports for .NET that occurs if you try to pass a dataview as a datasource to a report. The report has been built via a project dataset (XSD).

Here is the tech support entry. It has a tracking id of “CR ADAPT00117088”. I probably don't have the latest patch but there is no reference anywhere else to this track id.

The work around is just to pull the dataview data into a new datatable. Crystal doesn't give a sample so here is one for anyone who may be looking.

First here is the long way around if you need a table to move into a dataset.

Dim tbl As DataTable = myDataView.Table.Clone
Dim iRow As Int32
For iRow = 0 To dv.Count - 1
    tbl.ImportRow(dv.Item(iRow).Row)
Next
mycrystalreport.SetDataSource(tbl)  'this assumes you only have one table for your datasource

(I need to make a confession - I have been so stung by the problem of trying to move a table from one dataset into another that I didn't stop and think that I was sending a datatable not a dataset, so I did this the long way around. Thanks to Mike below for pointing out my silliness...see his comment for the easy way.)

I saw on Halley Suitt's blog this a.m. and was reminded in an email from O'Reilly press this p.m. that Joe Trippi just got added to O'Reilly's Emerging Tech Conference next week. They have a whole day  called the Digital Democracy Teach-In. I read somewhere that it is Joe Trippi that people run to for autographs during some of the (past) Dean travels.

Interesting post from 2003 PASS track chair, Roman Rehak, on the evals from the conference. Besides been a .NET developer, Roman is an absolute whiz with SQL Server and has been doing a lot of talks for developers on what they should really know about working with SQL Server. Keep an eye on his weblog for some great pointers and insights - and occasional recipes. He happens to be an awesome cook - I have been fortunate to partake in some of his wonderful meals.

Cannot figure out why I suddenly have to manually code in controls.add and controls.setchildindex when trying to add controls to an inherited form I haven't added anything to in a while. Strange and annoying.

Shelley Powers did it.  I am thinking of doing the same. Can anyone tell me what it's good for besides tallying how popular you are?

“You are connected to 26313 people through 14 friends.”

Why do I need 26,299 new friends?

Steve Smith, Mr. ASPAlliance etc is coming to speak to the Vermont.NET User Group on Monday night, Feb 9th and then he is on to Montreal for the GUVSM.NET User Group on Tuesday night. His Tuesday night talk in Montreal is an INETA sponsored event. Monday is a Julie & Rich's Bed & Breakfast sponsored event. Steve is coming (sans Michelle boo hoo) on Saturday and we are going to have some Vermont fun with him. I have decided not to make him ski since I don't want to be blamed for broken bones. We will take Steve snowshoeing in the Green Mountains as we have done with Chris Kinsman and Stephen Forte before. Steve is going to do a presentaion on Caching in ASP.NET and Whidbey. I (and many) are really looking forward to this.

Don't you always wonder what mysterious things are going on when suddenly a rash of (or even just a few) bloggers announce that they are going to “campus”. Oooh aaah. I remember last year James Avery talked about it a lot. I'm starting to see it pop up again. But you never hear WHY anyone goes. Everything is shrouded in mystery. Rory was the only one who said “I'm going because it's fun and my birthday”. There is definitily a big event coming up in April which is the MVP global summit. So you will hear a lot of people talking about that.

Blue Heaven's Ch. Silk Stocking

Silky at 3 months in 1994.

Silky the Champion at 2 years

Silky at 5 years

Silky is my parent's dog. I have always loved him madly - he's a hollywood hunk and a big love. But he's 10. 10 for Newfs is generall pretty old. He's feeling pretty badly now and they are putting him down today. He'll feel so much better after that and will always stick around. Especially to be with his best best friend in the world, Daisy. This is always outrageously heartbreaking. Here are more of Silky's family and progeny.

I actually went skiing yesterday. Rich and I went to Mad River and we skiid in the woods all day. THis is a big deal for me. I am afraid of trees. I do things like snow plow, make a turn and stop for  3 minutes, etc. One of the reasons is that even though I have skiid most of my life, I switched over to telemark skiing a few years ago and just don't have that edge of being able to ski on absolutely anything anymore (yet). But after a few hours my confidence was great. I wasn't swooshing down through the trees by any means, but I know that I can go in there and be in control and even enjoy myself a little. The rest of the ski area (open trails) was pretty windblown and classic eastern skiing while the woods had gobs of fresh (hard packed) powder. One spot that we skiid on not once but twice was (well seemed!) almost totally vertical for about 150'. So now I know that I can get down stuff like that too. And heck, I can even walk today.

Here are some great videos of awesome tele skiiers skiing in the woods, on the bumps and all over at Mad River.

We actually watched a good part of the super bowl, little of the 1st q and the full 4th q - apparently missed the half time tata show. Anyway, we were really curious about how they get that orange 1st down line and it was darned easy to find the answer on google.

This happened about 3 weeks ago. Surely it got blogged by millions and I still missed it.

http://www.businessobjects.com/news/press/press2004/comp_capstone_08012003.asp

My client and I are getting ready to start sharing reports via the web with clients.

These are the same reports we have in windows apps (VB6 and Winforms).

I want to generate the reports dynamically because there will be so many. There are thousands of clients (though only maybe 50 active at a time) and each client could have a number of projects and depending on the type of project, a *huge* variety of possible reports to choose from. We looked at this a few years ago with a company that had a whole management front end written that would juggle pdf or other doc types. But we would have had to export and send every single report for every single client. Egads. Dynamic generation please

So I seem to have these choices

Reporting Services
Win/Web Report Design: Web reports created with Microsoft's VS.NET based design tool
Still need to create my Windows reports with Crystal or ActiveReports
Management: built in
If we keep our current set up of webserver and sql server on the same box, we are golden with no extra licensing fees

Crystal Reports (this link may come as a surprise to some...)
Win/Web Report Design: Likely will get two for one creating report that can be viewed in WinForms or ASP.NET
Management:Will have to write my own asp.net app for report management
$$: Pay through the nose to license Crystal for use on the web

ActiveReports
Win/Web Report Design:Two for one report creation for Winforms/ASP.NET
Management:Will have to write my own asp.net app for report management
$$: Affordable Licensing

Other thoughts

I can easily have an ASP.NET front end to get at a report and a WinForms front end to get at the same report.

But I have a lot of pro/con weighing to do now.

I'd be curious to hear from anyone who has gone through this thought process to solve this same type of problem...

4/14/04: Now he tells me: I misspelled Casey's last name in the title and below and am correcting it for google's sake. But my misspelling, for those of you who came here for the laugh was “Chestnut“.

I haven't looked at Casey Chesnut's weblog in a long time. Not since I was fiddling with doing some work on the pocket pc for a client but that turned into a tablet/laptop app.

Don Box recently pointed to Casey's blog. I have been looking around there. I have a sinking feeling after looking at what he is doing which is something along the lines of wondering who I think I'm kidding sometimes when writing about the things I am learning. This guy is damned smart and he doesn't have to work too hard for it to show.

I am so unfocused - one day trying to rebuild my server, another day playing with ink controls, the next day looking at wse2 the next day Whidbey bits and then Lonestar and  around and over and under and back and forth. And all in between trying to do my own work, etc.  I don't get a chance to stick with any one thing long enough and I am looking at just too many things at once. Not sure where I am going with this thought. Part of me (and everyone I know) says I need a major vacation. But then of course I'll only fall further behind.

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